Peer Review: Difference between revisions

|nameurl=https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/979379894978150400

 

2/ In years past, you might have seen a post suggesting that stress doesn't cause ulcers. That fear of being labeled a Lamarkian was keeping us from seeing epigenetics properly. That carbs in the food pyramid were wildly off. That laboratory mice were engineered to approve drugs.

 

3/ My belief is that most great scientific ideas are likely dying w their creators because the cost of destroying the livelihood & reputation of any rival entertaining threatening ideas is so low, while the ability to do so has never been easier since peer review entered science.

 

4/ In particular, I think our young people need to not have to wait for the retirement of elders to advance new ideas. How many young people in Physics ask "Why is David Gross setting the direction yet again? Should we *try* giving the closing/opening talk to someone under 25?"

 

5/ What is moving me today, is a letter from Einstein to his friend Habicht in the fall of 1905. In it he opens up about a lack of complete confidence because the good lord may be playing a trick on him. And this during his "Miracle year"! So April 1st is the day to call g-d out.

 

6/ To put it in Einstein's terms "I cannot tell whether the good lord is playing a trick on me" but he seems to be telling me that perhaps it's really established scientists, science administrators, and research institutions who are holding back colleagues w/ better bolder ideas.

 

7/ So on April 1, let any junior faculty, adjunct, research assistant, student, outsider, or even Nobel Laureate who is foolhardy enough to come forward with disruptive dangerous unlikely but *competent* partial ideas do so without fear. Then let them develop those ideas for 1Yr.

 

END/ At the end of a year, let the fools report back. They can choose to abandon the idea without reputational cost, or pursue it letting the skeptics, the hard-asses, and the luminaries engage in their usual dominance displays & policing activities.

 

|timestamp=8:28 AM · Mar 29, 2018